About Comics offers several anthologies of 24 hour comics:

24 Hour Comics Day Highlights 2006

About Comics has announced the creative line-up for 24 Hour Comics Day Highlights 2006, listed in the January edition of Previews which hits stores this week.

• Frazer Irving, Britain’s National Comics Award-winning artist currently working on Marvel’s new Inhumans miniseries Silent War, depicts the violent mayhem involved in 24 Hour Comics Day, which he participated in at Comic-Kazi in Alberta.
• Jeremy Bear, who participated at home in California, brings us “Cubicle". It’s a dramatic tale of a man struggling with an odd conspiracy – or is he?
• Tita Larasati lets us in on her life as a foreign student in The Netherlands in “Transition”, drawn at the Lambiek comicstore in Amsterdam.
  
• Spooky Doll Kids creator Roseline Lau, working at the Artrage event in Fremantle, Australia, offers the delightful anthropomorphic tale “Caterpillar Crawler”.
• Edward J. Grug III, also at the Artrage event, lets us know why “It’s Hard Out Here for a Sea Monster”.
• Chilean-born Rodrigo Bravo displays an action tale in “Ruins”, crafted at Hairy Tarantula West in Toronto.
• Steve Troop brings the characters from his Melonpool series back to the page after a too-long absence with a tale drawn at The Comic Bug in Manhattan Beach, California.
• Alam Muammar, taking part in the Pengajian Komik DKV Community event in West Java, Indonesia, spins a dark and nearly-silent fairy tale parody with swordplay, dragons, and a handsome prince.
• Rob Osborne, the graphic novelist behind 1000 Steps to World Domination and Sunset City for Active Senior Living, introduces the star of his next graphic novel in “The Old Man and the Pants”, drawn at Austin Books in Austin, Texas.
• And if you don’t want to wade through all thousand pages of Ju Hui Judy Han’s PhD thesis in cultural geography, you can read her 24 page comics version of it, created at Elfsar Comics & Toys in Vancouver.

All of these stories were created on October 7th as part of 24 Hour Comics Day, an annual event where cartoonists all over the globe try to create a complete 24 page story in just 24 hours. The event is based on a challenge created by Scott McCloud, author of the classic Understanding Comics and the new how-to book Making Comics.

Over 1200 cartoonists took part this year,” explained Nat Gertler, founder of 24 Hour Comic Day and editor of 24 Hour Comics Day Highlights 2006. “I read a lot of fine work and had a hard time paring it down to the stories listed. These stories aren’t just good, they also capture the diversity of what was created on the day. Many books filled with worthwhile stories could be made from all the fine material that was submitted.”

To make editing harder, this year’s book is 256 pages, instead of the 496 pages of the books from the last two years. “While it’s a shame to have to say ‘no’ to so many good stories, keeping the page count down means the book can be priced at less than half the price of last year’s. The hope is that bringing the price down to $11.99 will entice more readers than the thicker, more expensive books of the past.

In addition to the ten 24 page stories, this 256 book will have art examples and excerpts from other stories, plus text about the 24 Hour Comics Day events.
24 Hour Comics Day Highlights 2006 (ISBN: 0-9790750-0-9, ISBN-13: 978-0-9790750-0-1) is a 256 page digest-sized black and white book priced at an affordable $11.99. It’s listed on page 208 of the January Previews, order code JAN07 3296.